From: Wolfson: Emet?

God’s eternity is characterised by a today that “does not yield to a tomorrow, nor did it follow a yesterday,” that is, the today is the fullness of a present that has neither past nor future.

[!note]
That is like trying to squeeze time into a bottle. To speak of an eternal present, with neither past nor future, is to speak of a timelessness.

The phrase “eternally begotten”—clearly a stumbling block to reason since the eternal cannot be begotten nor can the begotten be eternal—is the ontic source of temporality. It follows, then, that there cannot be a time when time did not exist.

In the fullness of time, the “everlasting” day that is “not preceded by a yesterday nor closed out by a tomorrow.” The mystery of incarnation embodies the temporalisation of the eternal—the timeless being through whom all times are made—that yields the possibility for the eternalisation of the temporal, the possibility for the human being to partake in the fullness of eternity realised in the simultaneity of the ever-recurring present that “flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration”.

• Precisely because “nothing is transient” in the eternal, the “whole is present” therein.

• The soul as the place of time or, to be more specific, time is defined as a quantity in the soul.

Augustine seemed to have grasped the intractable link between the tempo of time and the narrative structure of human consciousness exemplified in our inability to conceive of time in the absence of narrative or narrative in the absence of time.

Time, for Augustine, is indicative not of external objects but of the psychic mode through which these objects are represented in the human mind. The measurement of time, accordingly, applies to what endures in the consciousness of the present, not to the stream of past or future events.

The One, the ultimate principle of metaphysical unity, does not come to be and is thus not a “tensed being,” subject to the fluctuations of time.^[53] Any attempt “to taste eternity” when one’s heart is “still flitting about in the realm where things change and have a past and future” proves futile.^[54]

Eternity is not infinite duration, for infinite duration, though infinite, is duration nonetheless and is consequently measurable; the eternal, by contrast, must be immeasurable, the absolutely timeless as opposed to the unendingly time-bound.^[57]

The moment itself, the only temporal tense we can affirm as real, is analogously without duration and hence incalculable. The “moment is really time’s atom, but not until eternity is posited, and this is why one may properly say that eternity is always in §n étÒmv ̧ [the moment].”^[61]

Wittgenstein observed that what is perplexing to the mind is not the phenomenal experience of temporal duration as such but discerning the “kind of statement” (die Art der Aussagen) appropriate to articulate it.^[63]

Augustine holds fast to the conclusion that it is inexact to speak of three tenses, since neither past nor future exists independently of the present; thus, if one is to accord meaning to the customary way of speaking about time, the three times will be interpreted as three aspects of the moment, “a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.”^[64]

Science demonstrates unequivocally the human mind’s capacity to measure time mathematically—though, in point of fact, real time is never so measured—a tendency to “empty” the “content” of time “into a space of four dimensions in which past, present and future are juxtaposed or superimposed for all eternity.” In the spatialization of time, “conscious duration and real motion” are replaced by the “mathematical point that has been carried over from space to time.” What we call time is but a contrived artifice that “infuses living duration into a time dried up as a space.” Real duration is experienced as an unfolding of time that cannot be measured unless it is spatially converted. This experience, moreover, is not subject to articulation, since language cannot affix meaning to the temporal flow without arresting its mobility.^[68]

Reflection imposes the form of objective time upon an evanescent living present, but even the present has to be construed as a constitution of temporal intentionality striving for—though never finally achieving—a unitary object in the flux of manifold lived experiences.^[70] The present is not an “impressional point” lodged between past and future but rather a “concatenation of temporal phases” composed of retention and protention.^[71] … human consciousness displays a hybrid nature, as it both constitutes and is constituted by an ego-self^[72] that is constricted within necessarily limited boundaries, embodied, as we are, in an encasing that comes-to-be and passes-away, that is, an embodiment that is of necessity mortal and thus evidently time-bound.^[73] … “Doing time” is what we are primordially, not in the sense of chronological priority but in the manner of persisting in time as the evolving self (more process than substance) acutely attuned to bearing the destiny of being the being that is yet to become no more.^[75]

Time is the “moving image of eternity”^[79]

“time is that in which movement has occurred.”^[81]

Proclus argued, “All that is measured by time either in its existence or in its activity is in the process of coming-to-be in that respect in which it is measured by time.”^[86] As a necessary corollary, what moves perpetually cannot be measured by time, for it can never be said to come to be, and consequently it can have no temporal origin or end. What moves perpetually is imperishable, incomposite, and self-constituted,^[87] transcending all that is measured by time.^[88] Following an etymology proffered by Aristotle^[89] and reiterated by Plotinus,^[90] Proclus defines the “eternal” (aionion) as that which “always is” (aei on), in contrast to the temporal being that incessantly comes-to-be.^[91]

The undivided Eternity and the one Time; these are Eternity of eternities and the Time of times, since they generate the participated terms.”^[93]

Rather than positioning eternity and time in an antithetical binary, Proclus views both as “measures of life and movement in things”—eternity the measure of things interminable and time the measure of things terminable.^[94]

Insofar as transitory beings cannot be considered truly real, since true being is not subject to coming-to-be, it follows that time is the measure of that which perpetually comes-to-be, for in virtue of “its perpetuity it imitates the eternal nature.”^[95]

Two kinds of perpetuity are differentiated by Proclus: “the one eternal, the other in time; the one a perpetual steadfastness, the other a perpetual process; the one having its existence concentrated in a simultaneous whole, the other diffused and unfolded in temporal extension; the one entire in itself, the other composed of parts each of which exists separately in an order of succession.”^[96]

[!note] The unfolding of eternity into time…
I still go with the Lurianic point of eternity that emerges. In that each moment is eternal, each moment contains all of eternity. It is the soul that carries the narrative, that stitches one moment into the tapestry. So we have the perpetual moment of eternity, the eternal moments of the present, and then the soul, which contains the consciousness that is able to relate, in the sense of having a relationship with these moments, and by its specific relationship, create the narrative that is I. In the same way that there are the two moments, so are there the two types of relationship. One is eternal, almost divinely fashioned, and the other is human. One exists in perpetuity, and in that way, an expression of the eternal, and the other is temporal. In fact, each moment, containing the eternal, thus becomes the window, the eye through which the divine experiences the I.

Certainly, he accepts the proposition that if something partakes of soul, it partakes of time; but for him the converse is not true, as there are beings without soul that partake of time, and thus one must conclude that “time is beyond the soul” (Chronon Epekeina Psyches).^[103]

[!note] Disagree!
What being can be if it has no separate existence?

Time is engendered from the desire of the Intellect, identified as the Platonic demiurge, to overflow and to fill all things,^[104] and in this sense it is the imitation of eternity, though it is actualised in the physical world by the principle of self-motion enacted in the Soul.

[!note] Time
Each “soul” is woven into its own time capsule.
How to create a seperate existence in the singular Oneness of Infinity—where Infinity represents the Infinity of infinities? Place each one of these existences in time. Humans live up to 100 years of age. Galaxies, billions of years; quanta briefly—each one has its “time capsule”, it’s inner concept of time. This is not in alignment with the concept of “universal time”, UTC. How arrogant for this is actually an overlay that is fairly arbitrary over the whole world—the first step to global governance, taken many years ago.
Thus each one has his or her own “frequency”.